>Just to complicate matters (and I apologise if I'm trying anyones
>patience here), I think we also need to be clear on the *extent* to
>which I can copy something. I see someone has used a particular font, so
>I decide to as well. I decide to layout with a graphic in the middle of
>the page/screen. At what point do those individual elements combine to
>create a work which has a topographical arrangement and layout?
>Similiarly, at what point would it be illegal for me to take mark-up
>from another page and include it in my own?
I once asked this question about a gif image. Copying the entire
gif contravenes copyright.What about reducing it to say a 2 by 2 pixel display?
Charles Oppenheim indicated that the crucial test is
IS IT STILL RECOGNISABLE? I guess that test must apply to
individual and combined elements.
For example, a Colleage of mine
saw a rather effective frameset on the Web, and used it for his
own page. He acknowledged the source of this frameset by putting
a comment into the HTML source as a <!-- ...--> element. This
brought down the wrath of its author, who was convinced that
he had copyright to the frame set (it was 5 frames) and my colleague
had used it without permission. It is of course trivial to change
the frameset dimensions by a few pixels here and there, but did it
have to be changed so that it was no longer recognisable?
Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[log in to unmask]; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/
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